Remembering Gorbachev versus Boris Yeltsin tug of rivalries.

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Boris Yeltsin (right) with Mikhail Gorbachev after the failure of the August 1991 coup. 'I was probably too liberal as regards him,' Gorbachev says now. Photograph: Piko/AFP/Getty Images

 

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Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, said he should have left the Communist party months before the attempted coup of 1991. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

 

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[h=1]Mikhail Gorbachev: I was too soft on Yeltsin[/h] Twenty years after the coup that ended his stint as Soviet leader, Gorbachev muses on what he would have done differently

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• Jonathan Steele in Moscow
• The Guardian, Wednesday 17 August 2011 Article history
  
  
  Boris Yeltsin (right) with Mikhail Gorbachev after the failure of the August 1991 coup. 'I was probably too liberal as regards him,' Gorbachev says now. Photograph: Piko/AFP/Getty Images
  
  Mikhail Gorbachev has had 20 years to dwell on his regrets. There were the coup plotters he should have pre-empted. There was his Crimean vacation in 1991– in retrospect a bad time to go on holiday. There was the sense of change sweeping the Soviet Union, which he should have anticipated.
  And then there was his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, who should have been sidelined with some kind of diplomatic posting – London perhaps.
  "I was probably too liberal and democratic as regards Yeltsin. I should have sent him as ambassador to Great Britain or maybe a former British colony," Gorbachev told the Guardian in a wide-ranging interview marking the 20th anniversary of the coup that ultimately ended his six-year stint as Soviet leader.
  If the idea of Yeltsin as a diplomat hosting soirees at Kensington Palace Gardens seems far-fetched, Gorbachev's assessment of what went wrong 20 years ago – and what has gone wrong since – is more realistic.
  The last Soviet president is frank about what he got wrong and even franker about the course Russia should be taking now. Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, is blocking Russia's progress towards becoming a modernised democracy, says Gorbachev, adding, ahead of elections next year, that the current president, Dmitry Medvedev, would be a better leader for the country.
  "The modernisation plan put forward by the president in the economy, politics and other spheres is good but the president's possibilities are limited," Gorbachev says. "But he's being outplayed and outsmarted by Putin, I see.
  "Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] is calling for stability. He thinks we should stick with the status quo. But we say 'No, if you want to keep the status quo, then why are you talking about modernisation?'"
  He adds that Putin has squandered the windfall generated by high oil prices.
  "Those opportunities were not properly used and managed. Of course, now the issue is that we are facing a tide of social problems that will define the country's future, education, healthcare and other things. If we are not able to address those problems successfully, there will be no modernisation in Russia. We need a different programme from Putin's."
  Gorbachev celebrated his 80th birthday in March and is in the final phase of recovering from an operation on one of his spinal discs in April. But he looked fit, energetic and cheerful during the interview at his offices in the Gorbachev Foundation.
  On his own policies while in power between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev is unusually self-critical. He admits, for the first time in public, that he should have resigned from the Communist party and started a separate political movement in early 1991. He says things might have been different if the 100bn roubles (£2bn in 1991 money) being spent on weapons had been poured into consumer goods to fill empty shelves instead.
  Gorbachev's final years in office were plagued by the spectacle of bread queues, empty grocery stores and shortages in everything from meat to matches. "If we had taken 10 or 15 billions out of that budget to fill the consumer market with products, that would have given us support."
  But he rejects the suggestion made by some analysts that he should have followed the Chinese model of reforming the economy before permitting political change. The Soviet Union was at a different stage of development, he says, and only democratic change had any chance of producing real economic improvements to ordinary people's lives.
  Gorbachev is a Nobel Prize winner and is feted in the west for helping to end 45 years of east-west confrontation. But he is no patsy. On Nato's current bombing campaign in Libya, he is implacable.
  "Stop the bombing. Stop the killing. Stop the destruction. It's degenerated into killing people and destruction and I think this is really defiance. It's defiant behaviour," he says.
  "Let's go to the United Nations and discuss whether the current policy is acceptable. I say no. Poor democracy. Under the flag of democracy all kinds of things are done."